Context and issues
Integrated environmental policies, involving coordination between different sectors to reduce the impact of land-use planning and economic activities, have been identified for more than a decade as a major tool in the fight against biodiversity loss. However, their potential has not been fully realized, and the “greening” of sectors to enhance biodiversity over the last decade has not been at the required scale. The Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services, published in 2019 by IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), emphasizes the importance of multi-sectoral planning and the creation of locally relevant combinations of policies for achieving sustainability.
Ecological planning and related concepts are among the approaches promoted by IPBES. However, the application of these approaches remains in its infancy. Initiatives such as ecological planning in France provide an opportunity to study how these integrated policies can be applied and the way in which they can respond to environmental issues at different scales. The “territorialization” (regional application) of ecological planning gives substance to sectoral transitions by placing them in the context of the natural ecosystems involved and their specific issues. Ecological planning highlights potentially conflicting land and sea uses, between current activities (e.g. intensive agriculture) and environmental issues, or between environmental issues themselves (the race for space for sustainable production of food, feed, biomass energy or renewable energy infrastructure, and biodiversity conservation). It also helps clarify the consequences of land-use planning decisions. By emphasizing the role of elected local representatives in ecological planning, territorialization also helps bring these issues closer to citizens by putting them into context in everyone’s immediate environment.
While the climate aspect (mitigation, adaptation) is relatively well accounted for in these policies, this is less true for biodiversity, which is however the second pillar of the ecological transition. Policies continue to consider biodiversity as a constraint or limiting factor that requires impact management. This makes it difficult to achieve the objectives adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) or the resulting national strategies, and limits the responses provided in other areas of ecological planning (housing, climate, agriculture, etc.), which are then mainly technological or technical. An approach that takes biodiversity into account would call for more systemic changes.
Objectives
IDDRI is monitoring and analysing these political processes in France to confirm their potential for renewing the governance and implementation of biodiversity policies, including their links with climate issues.
From here the aim is to:
- draw a critical analysis of the way in which ecological planning, in its spatial, temporal and governance dimensions, integrates biodiversity issues in relation to national biodiversity strategies;
- formulating proposals, particularly in terms of methods and governance, to improve the way in which ecological planning contributes to the integration of biodiversity into spatial planning and socio-economic activities.
